Everyday Spatial Thinking and Mapping for the Young Professional
What is spatial thinking?
GIS can be more than just something you do as a professional; indeed, mapping could involve activities you engage in outside work hours. With your GIS skills, you can bring energy and knowledge to these activities, and conversely, these activities could even help you be a more valuable employee. Moreover, these activities can encourage development of spatial thinking—a key skill for the Young Professional. I define spatial thinking as the recognition, consideration, and appreciation of the interconnected processes and characteristics among the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, anthroposphere (human impact), and biosphere at a scale and time period appropriate to the phenomena under study. For an expansion of this definition, see my essay in ArcWatch.
Do you take time to observe with all 5 senses when you are in a city or in a rural area, thinking about what is in the foreground, middle-ground, and in the far distance, and the interaction between the physical and human-created environment?
Spatial thinking in everyday life
One way to foster spatial thinking is to draw a map from memory of a place from your childhood--your neighborhood, your walk to school, where you played in the riparian zone or vacant lot, your grandmother’s house, and so on. Draw it free hand, from memory—on paper, a napkin, or something else, using whatever physical markers, pencils, or paints you wish to use. Isn’t it amazing that your mental map of your childhood roaming spaces are at such detail? These large scale maps reflect geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of topophilia–that as humans we have an affinity for and a deep connection to place and space. Compare your map to those of your friends or co-workers: What are the similarities and differences in terms of scale, symbols and colors you chose, cultural vs. natural elements on the landscape, whether north is at the top, and so on.
Sketch maps from our childhood neighborhoods. I regularly ask my own GIS students to draw these, and here is a small collection of these wonderfully detailed maps from memory that illustrate how tied we are as humans to place and space.
We all practice spatial thinking on a daily basis – where we put our keys, how we arrange clothes in our closet or dishes in our cupboards, how we arrange app shortcuts on our phones, how we organize our files on our computers and in the cloud. Click here for 10 ways of thinking spatially each day.
Where are your keys? Do you always put them in the same place so you can more easily find them?
Consider how you have arranged the objects that you use every day. For example, I always put the hotel key on the corner of the desk everywhere I lodge so I will know exactly where it is. This is important since I am on work travel about 1/3 of the time. I once had the opportunity to hear Giorgia Lupi speak at a university. She and her colleague Stefanie Posavec authored a book documenting their lives in a series of very compelling infographics called Dear Data. This book focuses on how to effectively communicate the spatial and temporal arrangements of our day-to-day existence using infographics. For more on the day-to-day theme, read the spatial perspectives on our travel day that Barbaree Duke and I wrote about, here, as we each left our homes, traveled to the airport, and how and where we met before a geography conference (with a dashboard shown below).
Dashboard from an open survey about geography in everyday life.
Why not make maps for fun?
You make a lot of maps at work. A lot! But do you make some maps just for fun? You could even create fantasy maps. Have you uploaded your cycle rides, runs, or hikes to ArcGIS Online or a 3D Scene? As one interesting example, I mapped my colleague’s paragliding route in Alaska in the ArcGIS 3D scene viewer, here and shown below.
The route of a paraglider that I mapped in the ArcGIS 3D Scene Viewer.
Storymaps.com. Have you considered getting a personal subscription to Storymaps.com to document your favorite places around the world, the trip you took last year, or what makes your neighborhood special? Some of your fun maps could be hand-drawn. Consider Anton Thomas, who has spent 5 years creating an enormous hand-drawn map of North America, and a metropolitan area map that I made as a teenager, here.
GIS and GPS. You can have some fun with GIS and GPS in the field, as well. One of the earliest GPS-enabled field activities, which remains popular today, is geocaching. It is basically the world’s largest treasure hunt. My colleague and I found a tiny one here in an urban area, and I found one here: This one was larger but still challenging to find as it was in the desert and under a pile of rocks. When I worked for USGS, I set up an educational-related geocache, called an earthcache, on the San Andreas Fault in California, called “Gazing Across the Plate Boundary, with a series of geographic and geologic questions that I ask visitors to that cache to answer. I also receive a fun email whenever anyone visits the point!
Map your adventures. Many of us keep track of the number of countries or political areas within countries (cities, states, provinces, districts) that we have visited. You could use ArcGIS Pro or ArcGIS Online, or MapChart.net to digitally keep track of these. I know GIS professionals who seek to visit political boundaries or even “tri-points” where 3 countries, provinces, or states “meet”, those who search for benchmarks, those who climb as many high points in countries or states as they can, and other activities that rely on maps and data. As for me, I have been “collecting” as many of the 3,142 counties in the USA that I can visit over the course of my lifetime
Not lost! I am active in visiting full degree intersections of latitude-longitude lines. Here I am in the middle ...
I have also done a bit of “drawing” on the landscape with my fitness walks and runs, called “GPS drawing.” Use caution though since location can be personal: Some of my activities should not be mapped. For example, I am a caver, and there is a USA federal cave resources protection act that among other things discourages the publishing of cave locations, so that these beautiful places can be as well conserved as possible.
Spatial thinking as observations. Through these activities, I do some experimenting and have learned some skills in these activities that I bring to my GIS in education job. But your spatial thinking for fun does not have to be an activity—it can simply be thoughtful observations: Consider, for example, the spatial patterns in everyday things—food, vegetation, architecture, landscapes, roads, animals, and more, as I illustrate in this video discussion.
Get started. What activities and thoughts do you like to engage in that are related to spatial thinking and mapping? Certainly “balance” in all things is wise, so don’t feel that you need to make all of your non-work activities geo-related! But I encourage you to think about incorporating some of the above ideas, or, think of your own, and feel free to share them in the comments section below!